In Dante and the Limits of the Law, Justin Steinberg offers the first
comprehensive study of the legal structure essential to Dante's Divine
Comedy. Steinberg reveals how Dante imagines an afterlife dominated by
sophisticated laws, hierarchical jurisdictions, and rationalized
punishments and rewards. He makes the compelling case that Dante
deliberately exploits this highly structured legal system to explore the
phenomenon of exceptions to it, crucially introducing Dante to current
debates about literature's relation to law, exceptionality, and
sovereignty.
Examining how Dante probes the limits of the law in this juridical
otherworld, Steinberg argues that exceptions were vital to the medieval
legal order and that Dante's otherworld represents an ideal "system of
exception." In the real world, Dante saw this system as increasingly
threatened by the dual crises of church and empire: the abuses and
overreaching of the popes and the absence of an effective Holy Roman
Emperor. Steinberg shows that Dante's imagination of the afterlife seeks
to address this gap between the universal validity of Roman law and the
lack of a sovereign power to enforce it. Exploring the institutional
role of disgrace, the entwined phenomena of judicial discretion and
artistic freedom, medieval ideas about privilege and immunity, and the
place of judgment in the poem, this cogently argued book brings to life
Dante's sense of justice.
